Accenture Launches A Way To Edit Blockchains

Tom Groenfeldt
, ContributorI write about finance and technology.Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

Accenture has announced a way to edit blockchains that can be changed to correct mistakes such as a fat finger entry. The proposition has generated some intense opposition, as a Google search will show, especially by Bitcoin advocates, although the Accenture proposal isn’t meant for blockchains used in crypto currencies.

The Accenture concept, co-developed with Dr. Giuseppe Ateniese at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, NJ, is aimed at permissioned blockchains. In finance they might be run by a group of brokers and custody banks, for instance — trusted parties and counterparties. Blockchains for crypto currencies, by contrast, are designed to maintain currency accounts among parties who don’t know each other, so they were designed to be immutable.

Under the Accenture proposal, for which it is seeking a patent, individual users can’t change the blockchain, but an administrator or central authority could under previously adopted rules of governance.

“This relieves people of figuring out governance after the fact of a breakdown, and financial services have proven that things can go wrong,” said David Treat, managing director of Accenture’s capital markets blockchain practice, at the SWIFT Sibos conference in Geneva last week where Accenture demonstrated the invention.

“We need governance authority that can fix it predictably,” he added. “The only option is the hard fork, where you go back to a moment in time and destroy everything after. We think you can weaken the link between two blocks, fix the content of one and re-insert it without breaking the chain. It only works if everyone agrees.”

Accenture’s solution breaks a block from the blocks on either side in the chain, allows for changes and then re-inserts the block back into the chain while adding clear markets that something has changed. (For more details see Accenture’s paper).

One commentator at Sibos, feigning a yawn, said this amounted to a financial database, and that is so 1970s.